TSM Episode 81: Everyone Is a Winner

The lucky drawing takes place with a free game going to one lucky Lusipurr.com donator, with only six entrants eligible in the drawing! Also, SiliconNooB and Lusipurr note the continuing violent games controversy by violently expelling ‘Paradise Gas’.

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11 comments on “TSM Episode 81: Everyone Is a Winner”

Something that happened this week that wasn’t mentioned is that Sony has patented a way to lock game discs to a console. Of course it hasn’t been confirmed to be in the next Playstation, but considering the fact that the industry is as terrified of used games as it is of piracy it seems pretty damning for used games. Who knows, maybe locking out used games will cause Game Stop to finance hackers so that the next generation consoles will be hacked to allow used games on them.

I couldn’t remember if it had indeed came up on a podcast, although I do remember SN bringing it up on the site in the past. I wonder if they are trying to see how much they can push on their consumers before there is legitimate push back.

I have great difficulty in believing that even Sony could be this self-destructive, but the rumour has persisted for such a time as to make it somewhat plausible that they either plan on utilising this technology, or had planned on using it at some previous point in the PS4’s development.

This is suicide though, and if Sony can’t see that then perhaps they deserve to perish by their own hand.

@SN: I don’t know that the length of time the rumour has persisted equates to a likelihood that they will implement such a feature. They patented it ages ago, and in ten years they still will have patented it, even if they have no intention to ever use it. Yet, if we take length of rumour as a sign of increase in veracity, future Sony will be even more likely to implement the feature.

I think the reality is actually much more basic. Sony patented this feature; it is a disgusting feature which they probably won’t ever use; people are rightly disgusted by the feature; consequently, the feature continues to be (re-)talked about by people as they learn of it. It’s not as if we have buckets of new information, or even new developments. Rather this is the same old chestnut from before. Given that, I’d say the chance of Sony implementing it is as likely now as it was when it was first reported: not very likely.

Of course, if they are that suicidal, I hope they get what they deserve.

Besides intellectual property infringement, what gives Call Of Duty players the moral high ground NOT to see swasdickas? The orignal game let them play as Nazis, right? So they may play as the embodiment of pure evil (although all hired thugs who slaughter innocent people are on the side of evil IMO, whether they fight for the German vaterland or the U.S.A. empire or wherever), but some phalluses offend their sensibilities?! If they’re okay with shooting a human being in a game, what is it about penises that ruins the fun? It shows how divided the American adolescent male mind is. Simulated murder is okay, but reminders of their own genitalia are right out. Beating up prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto is cool, but genuine emotion and love is, like, gay or something. This really pre-adolescent mindset also goes for Activision community managers and Kotaku “journalists.”

I’ve NEVER played one of these games, or any FPS since about 1996 when I was 12, and have never been on X-Box Live so I don’t know, but dudes yell out statements like “I’m gonna rape you up the ass” and “suck my cock bitch” to each other on it right? And swasdickas are bumming them out… they just want all of their public acts of homoerotic aggression to be anonymous and in the dark.

I wouldn’t be surprised to read one day that in the next Call of Duty/Cocks vs. Dicks game, they let you piss on dead bodies.

SN brings up an excellent point on violent video game studies in the podcast. I did a couple of research projects on this subject in a School Psychology program, and (1) the studies which support the conclusion that there is an effect are mostly done by one man, or him and his associates, or are literature reviews which use his studies, and are funded by conservative family values groups (2) are within the margin of error in any case, but draw conclusions not shown by the experiment, (3) are experimentally irrelevant in the first place; my statistics professor for instance commented on how he didn’t understand what the experiment had to do with the conclusion (“That’s my point”). But they get referenced in textbooks and passed on by professors without question. They also rely on behaviorist assumptions, which accept only material causality and are uninterested in subconscious or unconscious motivations. So the idea that a human being might have intrinsic aggressive tendencies (as other mammals might) is invalid to them, as they believe all behavior is learned.

Zoltan’s Reading Room is very entertaining, but I have difficulty following books-on-tape when I haven’t read it first. So I’ve started reading A Confederacy Of Dunces and I just love it.

@Matt Dance: Sometimes, people post comments on the site that make me smile. And sometimes, people post comments that make me laugh. But very, very rarely do people post comments that make me smile, laugh, and also stand up and applaud. TODAY IS SUCH A DAY. (Have you considered applying to work here? If you have not considered applying, CONSIDER APPLYING. Please!)

“If they’re okay with shooting a human being in a game, what is it about penises that ruins the fun? It shows how divided the American adolescent male mind is.”

You make an EXTREMELY salient point, and I regret that I did not bring it up on the podcast. Julian and I were discussing this last night, but you have put it in a far more concise and clear way. “I DON’T WANT TO SEE PENISES! BUT HEY BRO, WATCH ME MURDER THIS BITCH WITH A TYRE JACK!”

“but dudes yell out statements like “I’m gonna rape you up the ass” and “suck my cock bitch” to each other on it right?”

I am afraid that your estimation of XBox Live Drones is actually much, much too high. I do not want to disabuse you of the notion that they possess at least rudimentary thought coherence, but I would be genuinely delighted if the discussion was as civilised and direct as you suspect. In reality, it is a dark and terrible morass, an abyss of filth.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to read one day that in the next Call of Duty/Cocks vs. Dicks game, they let you piss on dead bodies.”

We will now refer to CoD as “Cocks or Dicks”. Thank you.

“I did a couple of research projects on this subject…”

YOU should be on the news. Instead, we have Jack Thompson, the NRA, and the simple-minded peasants of Newton, CT.

“I have difficulty following books-on-tape when I haven’t read it first.

I have precisely the same problem, and in fact, I’ve never followed audiobooks well. I tend to start thinking about the things being said, which leads to me not listening to the things that follow. Hopefully, though, the audio presentation is augmenting the reading! (That was, secretly, the plan all along. Thanks to the reading, we’ve probably managed to increase sales of A Confederacy of Dunces by an almost invisible amount!

To my mind there is no more fitting emblem for CoD players than Swastikas made from penises. If people object to such crass and immature insignias then perhaps they might consider graduating to a classier class of shooter like Arma II or Counterstrike.

I would argue that it is actually impossible to prove that violent video games cause violence. Firstly, it is impossible to use police statistics to discern anything meaningful since reporting methods tend to change over time and a higher incidence of violent crime may just indicate that the police are doing a more thorough job of policing it. Secondly, in terms of discerning the cause of high profile crime, there will never be enough incidents in any sample of people in order to indicate a causal link. Moreover, it’s not like a researcher could create valid experimental and control groups, since it would be all but impossible to create two groups of a reasonable size where the control group is identical in every way but for the fact that they’ve never played violent games.

Even if we were to throw all ethical concerns into the bin and source our subjects from early childhood [presumably] before their exposure to violent gaming, that would still only establish the influence of violence on the developing childhood brain, which is not something you can reasonably extrapolate to even later childhood and younger adolescence, let alone adulthood.

All you can really do is a study on gamer populations and the incidents of violence therein [and then contrast it against other population groups], with inclination towards violence being within the margin of error, and the inclination towards mass murder being negligible.

I always wonder what these people think caused violence prior to video games (though I suppose it’s entirely likely that they don’t think about anything that might be damaging to the narrative they have chosen to pursue). The mind is a complicated construct, and it seems to me that for most people it would take more than simply spending time playing GTA to start shooting people and carjacking (though seeing someone hide behind a dumpster while waiting for the police to just stop looking for them after about 90 seconds is a somewhat amusing thought applied to the world we actually occupy). Do we think that these people honestly believe in the cause/effect angle, or is it possible that because they don’t like video games (a bold position for people who know essentially nothing about them) they then create reasons to hate them and try to get them banned or whatever the ultimate goal is?

I feel like the best thing that we can do as a community is take these imbeciles to task (which is something this website does admirably) and hope that at some point common sense might actually prevail.

@Kobold: Common people are INCREDIBLY simple-minded, and typically only think in terms of cause and effect. The are completely unaware of the distinctions between correlation and causation. If the media were insistently to bark at them that all of these shootings were carried out by people who drank large quantities of Mountain Dew, you can bet your eye teeth that the public would be demanding the heads of Mountain Dew executives, and would be throwing crates of the green shit into the harbour.

Lusipurr.com’s job has been, since day one, to tell people what’s what in the most direct and least namby-pamby way. Here, there is no time for tact or for sweetening, we just deliver the way it is in the sharpest, most trollish way we can manage. But, we are also relatively sanguine about the effect this will have. Our readers seem to be intelligent–whereas the rest of the world seems immune to even basic common sense.

I fear it is the stupids who will continue to drag the rest of humanity around by the nose. So, look forward to a future where, in a decade or two, we’ll look back on Bieber and Twilight as “not that bad, really”.